Educational Media Reviews Online

Animate Everything is a collection of five short videos showing how children can make flip-books and simple animated films. Director Scott Kiborn’s children, Lindsay and her brother Will, explain how animation works, demonstrating with sequential photographs of rocks, sticks, leaves, and a flower. By taking a photo, moving the objects a bit and taking another photo, over and over, they make a series of images that can be combined to create the illusion of movement. Pebbles form a smiley face with darting eyes; a flower travels down a road and along a beach.

In the second video the kids show how to make a simple flipbook by making dots and lines in a small notebook then flipping the pages. The third video is about animating with cutout paper shapes, featuring some fairly elaborate, colorful flowers and sea creatures which are fairly elaborately animated but nonetheless made from simple shapes. Cutouts of the children interact with paper vehicles and creatures, and become part of a familiar video-game scene. The fourth video shows in more detail how the children’s images were animated and how people can be animated in sequential photos. A final sequence features a class making animations and flip books using classroom supplies.

The animations pop with variety and color and are scored with peppy music. While Lindsay and Will get projects started, much of the film’s animation is professional-level work, intended to inspire children and spark the imagination. A bonus slide show explains in more detail how children can upload their photographs to movie-making software to create films (with perhaps some help from a parent or teacher). The DVD contains both English and French versions; any of the five chapters can be viewed separately.

Animate Everything is inspiring beyond a doubt, and explains animation in a way children can understand (“Take a picture! Move it! Change it! Shoot it!”). The stand-along segment on flip books presents a simple and inexpensive project. Otherwise even the simple animations shown require cameras, tripods and movie-making or animation software. Primary school teachers ready to supervise this kind of project—and having the resources at hand—will enjoy using this DVD in their classrooms.